bluefish

programmers editor

About Bluefish

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdevelopers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open source development project, released under the GNU GPL licence.

Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris.

News - Februari 1 - Bluefish 2.2.7 released

Bluefish 2.2.7 is mostly a bug fix release. It fixes rare crashes in the
autocompletion, the filebrowser, the htmlbar plugin preferences, in
file-load-cancel, and fixes a rare case of broken syntax highlighting after multiple
search/replace actions. It furthermore displays better error/warning output when
parsing language files. It also finally fixes javascript regex syntax
highlighting. The loading of files with corrupt encoding or non-printable
characters (such as binary files) has been improved, and project loading over
sftp has been improved. Various HTML5 tags have been added, and HTML5 is the
default now for php, cfml and other languages that can include html syntax.
Saving and loading of UTF-16 encoded files was broken and has been fixed.
Various languages have better syntax support, such as javascript, css, html,
pascal/deplhi, and html has improved autocompletion. On OSX the charmap plugin
is finally included, the keys for tab switching no longer confict with some
keyboard layouts, and behavior at shutdown was improved. The upload/download
feature has a new option to ignore backup files. The home/end keys now work
better on wrapped tekst. And finally the search and replace dialog correctly
shows the number of results when searching in files on disk.

Bluefish on Facebook

Bluefish is also on Facebook, if you want to contact the development team, but you do not (yet) want to join a mailinglist, try Facebook!.

Need hosting? Need a PHP course? Sponsor Bluefish!

If you choose A2 Hosting via our link, you help to sponsor the Bluefish project. Infinite skills, furthermore, hosts a PHP/MySQL tutorial with Bluefish; if you order it via the above link you help again to sponsor the Bluefish project.

News - April 21 - Bluefish 2.2.6 released

Bluefish 2.2.6 is mostly a bug fix release. This release fixes a critical bug
(segfault) in filebrowser that could be triggered if the root directory was set
as basedir. It also has a fix for a specific CSS-in-HTML-tag highlighting issue that broke HTML highlighting.
The filter code furthermore caused a segfault if the command did not exist. The
Windows version finally supports open in running process. Next to these bugs
many small issues have been resolved. Development checks are now only enabled if
Bluefish is compiled from svn, not if compiled from tarball. Various language
files have small improvements, most notably C, Javascript and CSS. Several
translations have been updated. A corner case for a new document from a template
that does not exist was fixed. The "open" submenu now opens SVG files from the
filebrowser instead of inserting an image tag. The included cssmin and jsbeatify
have been updated. A syntax scanning issue when replacing large chunks of text
was fixed, he "Report bug" link was broken, a new "conditional" option to the
language file that makes re-using certain blocks of language files easier was
added, and error reporting in outputbox was improved. On OSX filebrowser icons
and the "open file" dialog size have been improved.

News - February 10 - Bluefish 2.2.5 released

Bluefish 2.2.5 is a minor bug fix release but has also quite some new features.
The syntax scanning engine is faster after small changes to the text. The
filebrowser is also much faster with less memory usage, with various fixes and
new features. Projects now store the active document and active line numbers.
Indenting is improved in auto-completion and the smart indenting. Bookmarks and
paste special also have been improved. On OSX there are many improvements, such
as Mavericks support, Retina display support, working system hotkeys, native
input methods (Japanese, Chinese, etc.), opening files from the finder and
Widget bindings on MacOSX are moved to Cmd+C|V|X|A and working. Furthermore
almost all syntax highlighting has been improved, most notable jquery in
javascript, HTML5, and HTML5 in PHP files. There are also many bug fixes, such
as in wrap text on right margin, in the replace engine, the jsmin licence, the
split lines feature, the auto-recovery and many obscure bugs. Last bluefish now
has an appdata file.

News - February 12 - Bluefish 2.2.4 released

Bluefish 2.2.4 is mostly a minor bugfix release, but it carries many small improvements. It has various fixes for the tab-width on gtk 3.6, the blocksync feature, scrollwheel-zoom, language syntax detection and character encoding detection, toggle comment, split view, better ui language detection on OSX and Windows, and several more. The performance of Bluefish has been improved in a couple of ways, most notably the auto-completion popup speed. New features include more simple search options, paste special (to paste for example images from Libreoffice), control-tab to switch to the most recent document, save as copy, and pylint, cssmin, jsmin, csstidy and php_beautifier integration. Various language syntax definition files have also been improved. With this release the minimum required gtk version is bumped to 2.20.

News - June 28 - Bluefish 2.2.3 released

Bluefish 2.2.3 has mostly many minor bugfixes and many minor enhancements. There
are only few major changes: a corrupted state in the syntax scanner that could
lead to a segfault was fixed, code folding had major fixes and improvements,
search had major fixes, and a lorem ipsum generator was added. The GUI was
restructured in some areas, and some shortcut key combinations were added. Some
visibility features were added such as a bigger cursor and cursor highlighting,
and some options were improved such as zoom and the custom colors. External
commands had some changes such as better cursor positioning after a filter has
been used, user supplied arguments for external commands, and an option to
restore the default settings. On the multiplatform front: the broken shortcut
key S was fixed on OSX, and file recovery was fixed on Windows. On the web front
some dialogs were added for HTML5, the thumbnail generator was fixed, and insert
color, path and relative path have been added. Many language files were
improved, and more user configurable options have been added to most language
files. You can now select a block of text by dragging the mouse in the margin,
and move the selected block with <ctrl><up> and <ctrl><down>.

News - April 5 - Mailinglists functional again

News - April 3 - Mailinglist infrastructure down

The bluefish mailinglists are currently not functioning. This is being worked on, we hope to retrieve the list of subscribers, so we can re-subscribe all email accounts. This affects the bluefish-users, bluefish-dev and bluefish-cvs lists.

News - March 1 - Bluefish 2.2.2 released

Bluefish 2.2.2 is largely a bug fix release with some very minor new features. A
regression in the search functionality was fixed, that caused a segfault if a
document with search results was closed. Multiple replace with search results
directly next to each other corrupting the text was also fixed. The broken
cursor positioning that ruined the Zencoding plugin was also fixed. On the
multiplatform front: on Windows handling of the profile directory with non-ascii
characters was fixed and on MacOSX image browsing in the image dialog was fixed.
Two GTK-3 related bugs where fixed: the CSS dialog was unusable on GTK-3 and the
right margin indicator was positioned wrong. Next to the major fixes several
small memory leaks where fixed. Next to the bug fixes some small improvements
where made. Startup is slightly faster using more threads during startup and
improving the document recovery. The annoying scrolling of the side bar
filebrowser in 'treeview' mode was fixed, descriptions of language options where
fixed, and some menu strings, some HTML5 options where improved, accelerators
and shortcut keys got improved and translations got better. The new features:
duplicate line and delete line, and the Catalan translation.

News - December 23 - Bluefish 2.2.1 released

Bluefish 2.2.1 is mostly a bug fix release, but it has one major new feature: Zencoding support (requires python). The bug fixes include a fix to build on Gtk+-2.22, many translations are better up-to-date, a fix for PCRE regular expression searching, several layout fixes for Gtk+-3.2, several obscure segfault fixes, a fix for autocompletion of variables in PHP, <img> dialog fixes, and some memory-leak fixes.

Need hosting? Sponsor Bluefish!

Need hosting for your Bluefish project? When you choose A2 Hosting via our link, you help sponsor the Bluefish
project! A2 Hosting supports many of the Bluefish web languages included PHP, Perl and Ruby. MySQL support is also included along with SSH, CVS,
and FTP. You'll also get access to their free CDN, free Server Rewind backups and 24/7/365 support team. Use the coupon code BLUEFISH and
you'll receive a 5% discount.

News - November 25 - Bluefish 2.2.0 released

Bluefish 2.2.0 is a new major release and the start for the 2.2 series. Under the hood Bluefish 2.2.0 has a massive number of changes: Bluefish now works with gtk-3 (gtk-2 is still supported), and the syntax scanner had a major overhaul to make it faster, which is especially noticeable when working on large files.

Another big change in Bluefish 2.2.0 is the new search and replace function. It has been completely redesigned: the simple search function is now integrated in the main window, and the new function supports both search and replace in files on disk (next to already opened documents). Other new features include a toggle comment function that is context-aware (add <!-- --> comments in html code, use // comments in javascript code, etc.) and a select block feature that automatically selects the current context block and can be used multiple times to select the parent blocks. Another new feature of the syntax recognition is the autocompletion of user-defined functions, and a jump function that will bring you immediately the the definition of a function.

Next to all the new features many existing features have been improved and polished. Support for new languages has been added, such as Google Go, Vala and Ada. See the introduction to Bluefish 2.2.0 movie for a good overview.

On-line PHP/MySQL course with Bluefish

Infinite skills hosts a PHP/MySQL tutorial with Bluefish. by Robert J. Tucker. The first three chapters are available for free. If you purchase the course via the this link you will sponsor the Bluefish project.

What others have said about Bluefish

Bluefish is by far the most powerful among the HTML editors we tested. It is probably the most potent editor for Linux in general. (www.suse.com)

GPL-licensed Bluefish has become an excellent 'production tool' for those of who earn our living writing for Web sites, full of little 'speed you up' features [..] It is an excellent example of how a multinational group of talented programmers can produce a piece of work under the GPL that is at least as good as any commercial program (newsforge.com)

The Bluefish HTML editor is an excellent example of of how good open source programs can be. It is feature rich, with lots of time saving tools for experienced coders and friendly enough for newbies to be productive in little or no time. (www.linuxorbit.com)

If you've ever longed for an HTML editor that is easy to use, yet doesn't try to do everything for you, Bluefish is just the editor for you. It has a wealth of features that will make your programming easier, but in the end you retain total control of the HTML. (software.linux.com)

Bluefish marries the best of GUI's and traditional text editing into a customizable, useful package. (www.linuxplanet.com)

One of the most powerful editors for Linux + Supports many programming and markup languages + Lots of time saving tools for experienced users + Friendly enough for beginners + Its wealth of features will make your programming easier + While letting you maintain control over your code (www.lindows.com)